Without that “immediate reward”, there’s hardly a reason to use them. If a user will never notice, people have no more reason to put them into web apps than they do proper semantics.

There needs to be something for IE and FF that scans loaded pages for microformats and can make use of them before web apps will really start integrating them, imo.

Imagine you’re an e-commerce site, selling books. Other sites that scrape and index your site (Google, notably) have no ability to actually structure the data. They could TRY to derive the price (by looking for numeric content following the $, if it happens to be there). But they’d have a hard time understanding which text is the title, which is the author, which is the category of the book, etc.

Now, pretend that a specialized search engine (any shopping vertical site, for example) want to offer filtering capability by price. Or by category. Or by author. This gets REALLY easy if the scraped sites have microformats. Which makes their products more findable. Which means sales. Which creates revenue.

Anyone who has an interest in making their content more findable should consider microformats.

You also might consider the cost. Implementing microformats is absolutely trivial.

there are already extensions for firefox/mozilla that do just this.

Check out tails, operator, webcards and tails export.

There are also user style sheets for highlighting microformats in any page you visit.

Both the IE and FF3 team have shown considerable interest in native microformat support in future versions.

So the instant gratfication thing is here, and coming to the mainstream,

john